Welcome or welcome back to The Thoughtful Executive.
Last week I made the case for building a thought leadership program that supports the voice of Chief Legal Officers. They're not the only unique executives in a company that's often overlooked in the marketing sense. In fact, there are plenty. Look out for more case studies about these figures, starting today, because I want to talk about Chief Information Officers.
When we talk about thought leadership, it's heavy on vision, market, and bets. Broad, sweeping, and often sanitized commentary.
But CIOs can't operate in that register, which is what makes their voices worth publishing. Their world is made of decisions that are hard to reverse and expensive to get wrong. They're not easily swayed. They ask different questions. While other executives focus on the whats and whys of solving a problem, our friends in IT are trying to figure out the how. And it's never just one answer. It's a multitude of ever-evolving considerations.
So if you're selling something behind the big ideas, who better than your own IT leader to convey that message in a way that actually speaks to their counterparts' concerns?